Stories Indian Politicians Like to Tell

NEW DELHI — In May, Indians will vote on their future. Yet the political elite seems stuck talking about the past.

On one side is Narendra Modi, chief minister of the state of Gujarat, the face of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and the most contentious figure in Indian politics today. A son of grocers, he blames nepotism and corruption in the governing Congress Party for persistent inflation and a slowdown in economic growth.

On the other side is the Congress Party, which has ruled India for most of its history since independence in 1947. Sensing that it is in difficulty, the party has fallen back on a familiar tactic: reminding voters that it is the only guarantor of secularism — meaning, in the Indian context, the equal treatment of religious groups.

The Congress Party contrasts its tradition of inclusion — it is led by Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of the assassinated prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, and it appointed a Sikh, Manmohan Singh, as prime minister in 2004 — with the B.J.P.’s Hindu nationalism. It has pointed out the B.J.P.’s close ties with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing Hindu group. Deadly anti-Muslim riots broke out in Gujarat in 2002, under Mr. Modi’s leadership, and uneasy questions remain about whether he called for the violence or condoned it.

But the limits of the Congress Party’s strategy are apparent. Mainstream voters have begun to resent the way it seems to invoke secularism like a trump card, or even a kind of political blackmail. Maulana Mahmood Madani, the general secretary of the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, India’s largest Muslim organization, emphatically rejects the politics of Mr. Modi. But last month he publicly warned, “to not take the Muslims for granted and hope that out of fear of Modi the community will have no alternative but to vote for the Congress.”

“Instead of creating this bogey of fear,” he argued, the Congress Party should spell out what it plans to do “for the welfare of the minorities.” It is a measure of the party’s failures that secularism itself is now being associated with a politics of fear.

The main problem is that despite being in power for the better part of 60 years, the Congress Party has not managed to make its vision of inclusive nationalism a meaningful reality for most people.

Are minorities less likely to face discrimination in the states it governs? Not really. In Andhra Pradesh, for example, the police promptly — and wrongly — blamed 70 Muslim youths for the 2007 bombing of a mosque in Hyderabad, rather than conducting a fair investigation.

The criminal justice system in India is broken: Police agencies and prosecutors’ offices are extensions of the executive branch, which means that they are vulnerable to politicization. Yet the Congress Party has not created institutions, agencies or practices to insulate officials from improper influence.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Are perpetrators of communal violence more likely to be brought to justice in Congress-ruled states? Again, the answer is no. The riots between Muslims and indigenous Bodos in Assam last year, which displaced thousands of people, have not yet been fully investigated. This is nothing new: The Congress government has been accused of shielding many of those responsible for anti-Sikh pogroms in 1984 or the 1992 anti-Muslim riots in Mumbai.

On economic well-being, the evidence is mixed. According to a 2006 report by the Sachar Committee, which was appointed by the government to study Muslims’ social and economic status, the community is disadvantaged relative to all others. The Congress Party is at least partly responsible for that, if only because it has been in power for so many of the years since independence.

Having failed to implement its lofty principles about inclusiveness, the party can no longer claim the moral high ground. Yet it continues to take refuge in abstract ideological formulations rather than setting out a plan to fix political institutions.

Rahul Gandhi, the party’s fresh face, has compounded its weakness on this point by repeatedly reminding voters of his lineage — his grandmother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was assassinated in 1984, and his father, Rajiv, was assassinated in 1991 — to argue that he personally understands the consequences of a politics of hate. It’s a misleading message. Of course, these deaths were tragedies. But the Gandhis’ record on secularism were also considerably more complicated than Rahul’s telling lets on.

Indira Gandhi is now widely held to be partly responsible for encouraging fundamentalist Sikh elements that led to a bloody secessionist movement in Punjab state (and to her death). The government of Rajiv Gandhi pandered to Muslim fundamentalists by banning Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses” and overturning a Supreme Court decision granting alimony to divorced Muslim women. It also pandered to Hindu nationalists by allowing them to worship at the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. Both attitudes created insecurity and distrust among all religious groups.

Congress’s failures have made it seem less risky to back the B.J.P.

Meanwhile, the B.J.P. — whose credentials on secularism remain suspect — has tried to downplay its Hindu nationalist roots by claiming the mantle of Vallabhbhai Patel, a major figure in India’s independence and the deputy prime minister under Jawaharlal Nehru (the father of Indira Gandhi). It may seem like an odd choice, given that Mr. Patel was, like Nehru, a stalwart of the Congress Party. But in advancing a story line that claims Patel (supposedly clear-eyed, unsentimental and pragmatic) would have been a better prime minister than Nehru (cast as vacillating, emotional and ideologically deluded), the B.J.P. is attacking some of the Congress Party’s founding myths.

Despite massive social change and a yearning for strong but fair economic growth, neither party is articulating a discourse suited to the times. Both still prefer to conjure up a counterfeit history than propose a coherent vision of the future.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is president of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

INTERNATIONAL NEW YORK TIMES

A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 14, 2013, in The International New York Times. Today's Paper|Subscribe